You know I hadn't really given this thought until now, but a bunch of the insults thrown at my Aggressive Rollerblading brethren (or whatever you want to call it) are also homophobic. And also inline skating itself in any form seems to be associated with homosexuality. When did this happen? And now that I think about it double-fuck the Human Giant joke about it for being both ignorant and homophobic. This is how stupid homophobia really is, that ignorant and dumb people use it to mock things that aren't remotely related to it. The biggest throwing of stupid insults to rollerblading has been from the skateboarding industry. A so-called "outsider" culture (you are no longer a subculture when your pros can afford "cribs" style houses and people use your image to sell car insurance) that should fucking know better.

I think what has happened here is really pretty simple and a story so old its become a cliche. Skateboarders are now the jocks of the extreme sports genre, and rollerbladers are the nerds. And what do jocks do to nerds? By extension, what does any part of mainstream culture do to something deemed uncool? We shit on it, push it into the edges of society. And homophobic language is still, despite all the supposed work towards "acceptance," used to demean anything that is deemed as lesser. So rollerbladers become fruitbooters, rappers still use the word "fag," and fucking idiot jock douchebags coming out of a Knicks game beat the shit out of two gay men in broad daylight outside Madison Square Garden. And those same type of homophobic dickwads try to mess with me when I'm on skates for the same reason. I am in no way trying to equate the two, just pointing out that intolerance doesn't always just effect the minority being persecuted, it can also effect people who are only vaguely associated with it.